Quagmire in Colombia.

As U.S. involvement in Colombia escalates, the situation looks more and more like Vietnam or El Salvador: American participation in a civil war begins unofficially, only to snowball as more and more money and military advisers pour into the region.

Jesuit priest and Colombian human rights advocate Father Gabriel Izquierdo visited the United States recently to plead with Americans to consider the effects of U.S. military aid in Colombia. "We are afraid that, with the increasing military deployments from the United States, it would be very easy to escalate the conflict," he warns.

Father Izquierdo is part of a Jesuit think tank that tracks political violence in Colombia. With the Bush Administration proposing to augment the current policy of $2 million per day in mostly military aid to Colombia with an additional $882 million over several years to Colombia and its neighbors, the impact of U.S. aid in Colombia should be a pressing concern for every U.S. taxpayer, he says.

The Dallas Morning News reported in 1998 that "tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across Southern Colombia employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans, and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980s."

It's only gotten worse since then.

Thanks in large part to the Clinton Administration's mindless pursuit of the failed war on drugs, Colombia is this hemisphere's largest recipient of U.S. military aid. The United States is pumping $1.3 billion of "anti-narcotics" money into the military there, which has its own agenda as it fights an endless, unwinnable war against left-wing insurgents. Because of rampant human rights abuses by the Colombian military, Congress passed rules insisting that there be some scrutiny of the human rights records of aid recipients.

But, as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International point out, covert aid doesn't have to be reported. So it is impossible to find out how much money the CIA is spending in Colombia and for what. The use of undercover operatives, paid through such military contractors as DynCorp and East, Inc., avoids public scrutiny and "the scandal that would erupt if U.S. soldiers began returning from Colombia in body bags," as a recent Associated Press report put it.

The drug war rationale for U.S. aid to Colombia is hopelessly flawed. True, recent anti-narcotics efforts in Peru and Bolivia have reduced drug exports...